Grit Lab Report

Hi Gabriella,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 5: I have an interest that is not only enjoyable but also aligns with my personal values .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were universalism, self-direction, and benevolence.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.

You said your top three talents were social, spiritual, and verbal.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you felt totally clear about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to applying to fellowships .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said I want to case 2x a day .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said I’m prepared for my interview and feel confident .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said I’m tired and cancel casing .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When my alarm goes off to case then I will get out of bed and case .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in Casing .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt Interested when receiving critical feedback, and Interested when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being everything .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .

In one word, you said it made you feel Warm .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Happiness is the pursuit of your goals
When you're trying to communicate something, it should be maximally meaningful/relevant and appropriately difficult.
Live every day like you're the 12th player on the bench
Goal hierarchies enable harmony
plans articulate intended future action
Ask for feedback!
Ask for feedback! (And advice)
Optimists see failure as temporary, local, and controllable.
When you change your situation, you feel less tempted
Find good mentors
Every no is a chance to say yes when it matters

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Philip Pan
Gabriella is an incredibly considerate, charismatic, and thoughtful person. Her care for others shines through in her weekly recounts of the different ways in which she interacted with and strengthened her communities on campus, and her positivity is infectious. Not only is Gabriella an inspiring group leader, but she is also an attentive and active listener. During our group discussions, Gabriella is always asking questions to better understand the perspectives of her peers and doing so with genuine curiosity and enthusiasm. Gabriella’s passion for education has been a consistent theme throughout this semester, and I am confident that her grit and commitment to helping others will enable her to excel in this field. Having heard about Gabriella’s interest in education the entire semester, it was exciting to listen to Gabriella describe her exploration of the field for her discovery project. What Gabriella mentioned about the limitations of engaging with education from certain career perspectives (e.g., policy and admissions) stood out to me in particular. I love how Gabriella took the initiative to speak with as many people as possible in each of her prospective fields of interest, and I found the rigor of her exploration quite compelling as to Gabriella’s ability to succeed in crafting a career in education that suits her personal interests and desires. I look forward to seeing how Gabriella leverages her experience in consulting for good.
Vishal Krishnaiah
It has been wonderful getting to know Gabriella these past few months. She’s very kind and bring a positive, exciting energy to our weekly team meetings. She’s been more than willing to help when asked, enjoys being a mentor where she can, and is eager to learn all she can from those around her. She’s also a deliberate and thoughtful listener who clearly cares about what other people have to say in a conversation, no matter how small or large their comment may be. I most want to thank her for her kind-heartedness and her sense of humor, they’ve definitely made my Grit Lab experience far better. I really liked how Gabriella tied her discovery project to her values, that was something fairly unique to her presentation. I also liked how she described a path forward for herself that was not too broad to the point where it was ambiguous but also not too specific to the point where it constrained her options. She also engaged in multiple iterations of the same activity, most notably having multiple curiosity conversations, which conveyed a real effort to pursue this goal rather than simply checking off boxes. Last thing, the community service element of her presentation gave the whole project more meaning, and I liked how she showed you can pursue this interest as both a career and a hobby and an activity all at once.
Stanley Liu
Gabriella is a breath of fresh air. She cares deeply about her friends and being involved in the Penn community. This was very apparent throughout the semester as she described organizing fundraisers for her sorority, mentoring dozens of young students, and constantly seeing the positive qualities in every person. Gabriella has a natural curiosity to learn and explores her interests with tenacity. I was very impressed by her extensive involvement in increasing the accessibility of education in Philadelphia through her involvement with the admissions office, curiosity conversations with educators, and other initiatives. She is a fantastic listener and genuinely cares for the well-being of others. Gabriella was a delight to work with throughout the semester.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.